“Do what you love and money will chase after you.” This mantra is one of the leading reasons for the explosion of small business owners, who are no longer satisfied working 9 to 5 or spending the most productive part of their lives caught in traffic to go to a job they hate. Why relegate your passions till the weekend or postpone them until retirement? What are you still waiting for when you can do what you love and earn an income from it now?
“Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan. There is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times,” said Tim Ferriss in the New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek. While it is a great idea to follow your passion, should you build a business around it and is passion enough to sustain that business? For budding entrepreneurs, it is important to note that having passion for a certain line of business doesn’t make it easy. It is risky to let the high wave of passion, influence how you run your business.
To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to be passionate about what you are doing and keep improving at it. Passion is a critical element for you to show up daily and be dedicated in running the day-to-day tasks of making that venture stand. This also includes running aspects of the business that you do not enjoy, with an increased workload compared to when you were just an employee with a job description.
Most people however, tend to have the wrong perception of “do what you love” because they think every day will be all sunshine and rainbows. Yes, you are now your own boss, but most of the responsibilities rest on your shoulders because it is no longer the usual 9 – 5. While passion is important, it takes discipline to succeed. Discipline is choosing the right thing to do for the business over what you want. The real passion is knowing what you want and staying committed enough to doing the things you don’t enjoy to get the work done.
Discipline is conversing taxes with your accountant, over burying your head on your desk because numbers make your head spin. Or optimizing your Twitter ad campaigns you have been postponing for a while, rather than scrolling through your friends’ social media updates. “Career decisions are not decisions about ‘what do I love most?” says Penelope Trunk, founder of Quistic, an online academy on career development. “Career decisions are about what kind of life do I want to set up for myself?”
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